Hungary
2.5*
Director:
György Pálfi
Screenwriters:
Zsófia Ruttkay,
György Pálfi
Director of Photography:
Gergely Pohárnok
Running time: 91 minutes
How seriously can we take a film in whose first scene a character makes love to a candle and shoots fire out of his penis?
Director György Pálfi has produced a film that doesn’t look half bad but he has put all his eggs in one basket and forgot to fashion a proper story. There are many random episodes of obscenity and downright senselessness, but the film also contains moments that bring to mind a director with visual flair such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Taxidermia is a word that doesn’t mean anything in English, nor in Hungarian, except to suggest the job of one of the film’s characters, Lajoska Balatony, who is a taxidermist. By the end of the film, the viewer will have realised that the title is actually the name of an artwork, the production of which brings the film to a very gruesome climax.
Basically, the film can be separated into three stories that centre on three different characters. Besides the terribly gaunt Lajoska, who is in the last story, we also see his father, Kálmán, a champion speed eater, and Kálmán’s harelipped father (Lajoska’s grandfather), Morosgoványi, who is a soldier by day and pleasures himself at night so that his hard member can either breathe fire or shoot its seed all the way to the stars.
While the first act is all about sex, and ends with a very ambiguous scene in which Morosgoványi seems to fantasise having sex with his lieutenant’s wife before waking up and finding that he has committed an act of bestiality with a dead pig, the second act is about food, and lots of it. Kálmán, who was somehow conceived during his father’s fantasy encounter, was in fact born of a woman but with a pig’s tail. His stepfather, the lieutenant, clips his tail shortly after birth, but then the story skips forward a few decades to a speed-eating championship in Communist-era Hungary, where the event itself is as interesting (and as grotesque) as the post-match purging behind the curtains.
Don’t watch this film if you have an upset stomach.
The main interest of the film lies in its unconventional subject matter and the beauty with which such obscenity can be represented. But for all its interesting little incidents, the film lacks a narrative thread and, most importantly, fails to link the three main characters in any significant way. It is an easy comparison to make, but the taxidermist’s job of removing an animal’s hide, and using it without the original meat that it used to cover, mirrors the film’s hollow innards.
Taxidermia is fond of its extreme close-ups, but very often we cannot easily figure out what is going on because the camera refuses to reveal the bigger picture. However, the special visual sequences, such as a spinning bathtub at the beginning of the film, are dazzling and gorgeous to look at, until we realise that they serve no real purpose beyond the immediate jolt of visual stimulation. I also would have appreciated fewer shots of baby genitals.
The film would have benefited from a more tightly controlled screenplay since there are numerous possibilities to explore, but none is really given the opportunity to develop, until the last act when the film seems to finally settle down and focus on the story and the characters at hand. I applaud this film for coming up with a character even more obese than Gilbert Grape’s mother, and for that character (Kálmán) to deliver the most memorable line of the film: “I had a vomiting technique named after me!” – a source of great pride for the speaker. The instances of body horror are also enough to give Machete a run for its money. However, the film’s final scene, in which a sculpture that looks like a monstrous combination of the Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David is offered as a work of art, is dangerously close to pretension.